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How to Stream to Twitch, DLive AND Mixer At the Same Time! + Some quick instructions to restream with Mixer FTL!

So anyone starting out should always try to reach to more people. This is why I wholly disagree with Twitch’s Affiliate/Partner program because once you reach that, you are “restricted” to stream only on Twitch on your on days. Not good! But, if you’re starting out, reaching as many people as possible is your best bet, so why not cover a lot of the popular platforms?

How do I Stream to Multiple Platforms?

Fortunately, in the recent years, developers have come up with ways for streamers to reach as large of an audience it can. These are called restreamers, with some of the most popular being Restream.io and castr.io. What you do is you go over there, sign up!

Now here’s the thing, here’s Restream’s pricing details, but since we’re financially frugal, we will always pick the free option (unless you need to Stream to Facebook and Steam, then you would want to stream to Castr).

How to set up Restream

1) Registration Once you go on the website, you’re greeted by a registration screen. How convenient. Put in your particulars and hit submit. You will have to verify your email but aside from that, you’re now able to start!

2) Setting up your channels

Now that you’re registered, you will have a blank dashboard. This step will require you to have accounts on each of the streaming platforms you want to stream on. Now the following screen will have some channels already linked, but the steps are still the same for all platforms you want to add.

Clicking on the giant orange button that says “+ Add Channel” will lead you to a screen with all the platforms available on Restream.

As you can see, all the available channels that you can do on Restream is available right here, including the paid channels you can link to (see pricing above). Just click one and it’ll tell you if you want to connect. If you have more than one channel on the same platform and restream to both, you will have to pay for that. For now, I’m going to use Mixer as an example for connecting.

So after clicking on your desired channel, you now have to allow Restream to access your details on that platform. Fortunately they gave you easy access to do by clicking on Connect Mixer (and it will prompt you to accept Restream after you log into mixer) or do it manually. There are instructions if you follow the prompt.

Now do this for all the platforms you want to connect to.

3) Setting up your Social Media

Back on the Dashboard, you want to click on Social Alerts. This will let Restream to push out any message you want out to say that you’re live! Pretty handy, isn’t it? Here are your options:

You can choose to ping to Discord, Twitter and Facebook. All you have to do is connect your pages/accounts and you can have Restream send it out for you automatically!

For Discord, you also need to add what channel you want to Restream to yell your notifications at. As you can see above, Restream is outputting these updates right at a channel called “#action-stations” on my Discord Channel. No web hooks needed.

You can even customize your message text when it is even sent out! I have set to tweet out my channels and people that I want to retweet it too. In the Streamer world, it’s best to tweet it to retweet Twitters for the channels you are streaming to.

4) Getting ready to go Live!

Now that you’re all set up, it’s time to go live! Back on your Dashboard, look to your right. This is where you will set up your stream credentials as well as where you’re coming from. We are going to assume you know how to get your Stream keys from your main platform. Here’s the place you need to put your stream credentials:

You need to set the server you are stream from (although you can set it automatically… However, there’s a caveat. More on this later). Take the stream key that you have earlier and put it in the place where it says Stream Key. For this you need to select all of that and paste it. It should overwrite what was in the spot earlier. Restream will pull from your main stream (Twitch, whatever) and broadcasts it to other places!

Now you’re free to press start stream on your streaming program and get going!

How to Restream with Castr

1) Registration This is what you are greeted to by Castr when you first land on their page. They tend to like to give you a nice presentation as to why it’s good. Anyway, you can register by placing your credentials in the sign up spot below. Logging in is not so obvious though. You need to go to this URL: https://castr.io/signin Here’s their pricing scheme if you want to upgrade (scroll down their main page for more info):

The thing about Castr is that you can stream on Facebook, Steam and Mixer FTL with no problems. Restream requires you to pay for Facebook and you need to do a bit of tweaking to stream on Mixer FTL.

But again, we’re frugal gamers so we’re obviously going to keep it free. 🙂 (You can always upgrade later if you need to)

2) Creating your channel

Clicking on the “Add Stream” button will give you two options. Since we’re restreaming, pick the first option. You will then enter your nearest server and put in your Stream name.

3) Add channels

This is your dashboard. Hit “Add Platform” button and you will see this:

4) Time to Push! Now back to your Dashboard, we now need to start setting which one to restream from. I am going to use Mixer yet again, because I have to cover Mixer again for another mini-step.

So for Castr to restream, it has to pick where it’s drawing from. Make sure you’re on the “Pull” setting, which is highlighted in pink. Put in your stream URL in the pull source. Pay attention to the red arrow near the top of the image. When you are streaming from DLive for example, head into your dashboard and put in your stream URL into that spot. Make sure you turn off DLive (or wherever you’re pulling from). You don’t want to push to where you’re streaming from otherwise the stream won’t work. Green and right means on, which means you are pushing to those channels.

If you want to stream from Mixer FTL, pay attention to the red arrow near the bottom of the screen. Click on the Get Mixer Pull URL and enter your Mixer username when prompted. Make sure Mixer is off and white and away you go!

You can now stream to your heart’s content. 😀

Bonus! How to Stream Mixer FTL on Restream

Mixer features FTL streaming, which means less delay between you the streamer and the viewer. This increases interactivity for everyone! If you have problems trying to stream Mixer FTL on Castr, Restream is capable of doing so. It’s quite a workaround but it’s there. First you need to open up Command Prompt or Command Line. And do the following:

Pay attention to the highlighted bits. The first highlight is the command you must type in command prompt to get Restream’s servers.

But before you do, you need to find your Mixer Ingest server. Find the one you are closest to. It should match or be as close to the server your Restream server is from. Make a line specifically for Restream like this:

(IP from above) (Mixer Ingest server here)

It should look like this:

Save and close the hosts file and head back onto your Restream Dashboard. You want to pick your RTMP server close to the server saw earlier. Copy your Stream Key and open up your streaming program. I will be using StreamLabs to show you how.

Under stream, you want to pick Mixer FTL, and pick the server closest to the Restream server from earlier. Copy your Restream Stream Key and put it under your Stream Key on your streaming platform. (Key is censored but given a generic structure for ease) It should look like this:

re_xxxxxxx_ecxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Now you need to edit this by removing “re_” and replace the _ between ec and the first set of xs with a “-“. It should look like this:

xxxxxxx-ecxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Save your settings and test your stream. You should now be able to have minimum delay between your viewers on all platforms!

Time to increase your audience!

I hope this helps you guys reach a wider audience not limited to just your primary zone! It can be a juggle trying to meet up with your viewers and try to interact with them but this means you can reach more people! Good luck out there!

As someone who wants (the right) things preserved for posterity, I definitely think it’s a good idea to stream to at least two different services just in case technical issues arise when trying to watch/download a stream post-broadcast. There are so many good moments that can otherwise be lost to the sands of time!